What I'd like to know is, where is Sun in all of this? It's nice that Red Hat and others have stepped forward with IcedTea to get towards a completely free implementation with OpenJDK, but why haven't Sun done that already? It's been over two years, and there hasn't been a peep out of Sun about getting the JDK (and the code) they produce as a completely open sourced and free implementation.

What I'd like to know is, where is Sun in all of this? It's nice that Red Hat and others have stepped forward with IcedTea to get towards a completely free implementation with OpenJDK, but why haven't Sun done that already? It's been over two years, and there hasn't been a peep out of Sun about getting the JDK (and the code) they produce as a completely open sourced and free implementation.

Where is Sun in all this? Oh, I don't know, actively working with the community to resolve these issues?

I'd suggest following the respective mailing lists of the OpenJDK project if you are really interested in weighing contributions in the OpenJDK community by their employers. Suffice to say that developers employed at Sun have been very active at removing the remaining encumbrances over the past year, as have developers employed by Red Hat or other companies.

It's how community efforts work: you work together on shared goals. Sun is working closely with others on OpenJDK, which is why it only took a couple of months after the inception of OpenJDK6 this year for a distribution to have its own build pass the compatibility test suite.